Animal agriculture is a leading cause of the climate crisis due to deforestation for cow farming as well as greenhouse gas emissions. It’s also the leading cause of biodiversity loss (of plants and animals) and deforestation around the globe. Animal agriculture pollutes waterways, ecosystems, and air because of the tremendous amounts of waste that comes from these farms. These harms occur at every size and type of animal agriculture operation.

The vast majority of climate scientists agree that animal agriculture is a leading cause of the climate crisis (global warming). Ruminant animals (cows, sheep, and goats) emit methane during digestion which is a greenhouse gas that remains trapped in the earth’s atmosphere causing a gradual warming of the planet. While there were naturally evolving ruminant animals in ecosystems around the world, these ruminants weren’t among them. The naturally occurring animals have been killed off to be replaced with farmed animals and ecosystems continue to destroyed to create pasture lands to graze ruminants, notably cows. Animal Agriculture’s attempts to market “pasture raised” and “grass fed” herds are a good marketing strategy but raising herds on grass instead of feed lots actually causes more climate and environmental harm due to heavy resource usage.

The leading cause of ecosystem destruction and thus species extinction as well as deforestation globally is animal farming. Farming large animals is incredibly resource and land intensive and native plants and animals are destroyed to be replaced with farmed animals and food grown for them to eat. Over 80% of the Amazon rainforest loss through fires is because cow farmers are burning it for animal feed farming and grazing. The forest will not come back. Currently, 96% of animals on the planet are humans and animals farmed by humans – this is because of the drastic loss of life and biodiversity largely due to animal farming practices and the increase in animal farming production globally.

Animal farming leads to pollution of waterway, air, and terrible damage to all local ecosystems around farm operations. There are lagoons of waste around industrial farming operations that spill into local waterways; this can lead to marine die-off including ocean dead zones. Air around industrial farms is also extremely polluted and harms local wildlife, humans who live near the farms, and their companion animals.